


soles in the soil, eyes on the stars

by Anonymous



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate alternate series, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Sexism, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, allusions from outsider perspective to Jewish Amanda Grayson, author is an unapologetic TOS fan, in this one Nero causes a nuclear winter on Vulcan rather than its destruction, it was unnecessary to revise Kirk's character like that, not necessarily canon compliant, or fridge Amanda, or so much other stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-03-23 07:53:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13783092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Winona Kirk loves the earth and things that grow on it. She doesn't mind being there, but she doesn't mind her son making his destiny out there among the stars either.





	soles in the soil, eyes on the stars

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Starships and Barbie Dolls](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2696510) by [lodessa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa). 



It had nothing to do with being a woman, her staying mostly on earth. But people _still_ say that.

And it hadn't had anything to do with her being a girl when that week happened that changed her life forever after. The week that ended in that hazy night, indelibly etched in her mind, when she flopped on her back in the stubble of a wheat field, retched up nothing but bile, and stared up at the constellations she'd learned about in school. She'd woken up damp with dew and been ushered post haste to a checkup and a therapist...

But some things do pertain to that, even these days...

* * *

She let Jamie go to the Amish school, let him learn to write with a dip pen on the paper they manufacture from field waste. He reads _Anne of Green Gables_ and not just relates to it, but emulates some of the antics.

But she also teaches him to navigate, to look at the stars, all she got to learn about how life and the world work at the most elementary level; or makes sure he is taught about other countries, and histories, and medicine.

Cynthia Kirk, who she never hated, gives her a pitying look when they meet at the grocery, because her bookish boy isn't getting quite the same education the brother his grandmother took custody of is. 

And that isn't fair, not really, but she was given the choice of Jamie or neither, because she had left Sam briefly with the Kirks, because even in this day and age people question single motherhood.

* * *

Winona had visited the stars, had gone aboard the Kelvin for a while while pregnant with Jamie. George, the man she loved, loved space, and she could not say it was a bad place to visit.

She had her extensive experiences coaxing things to grow, and training as a med tech for many of the everyday injuries on star ships. They assigned her to botany, and she and George know enough about history that they joked about her being on the botany bay (C being the actual bay designation). They'd expected George to soon get an assignment where he couldn't readily return to earth, and that was why she had taken the opportunity and savored those days. 

But, especially after the disaster, she has no desire to remain among the stars. Her heart may have loved a man who lived for space, but her beloved for longer than that has been the earth, the soil, and the things that grow in it.

That had been cemented, after her experience with the cult. She would say it was life-changing, but in all the small and mundane ways it hadn't been intended to be. She didn't come out of getting kidnapped and subjected to a week of sermons and some sleep deprivation with a particular religious conviction. 

Only, as they'd spoke of humans never being intended to take to the stars, Winona had reached the conclusion that there was enough to do here, on earth, that she wanted to spend her life surrounded by growing things, and it was quite enough, for her, to gaze up at the distant stars, knowing someone who shared her small home planet was exploring them.

* * *

A few years into being a teenager, Jamie gets into a fight, which is something she both feels she should have anticipated, and wishes she didn't have to deal with. He gets dispatched to the medcenter and there she finds him with a broken nose and some Starfleet cadet she hasn't meet before.

"Don't be too hard on him," the cadet says, holding a coldpack to her cheek.

"You're not helping my case, Nyota," he says, and squirms a little at the attention.

"Why'd you fight, Jamie?" Winona asks gently.

"Mo-om," he protests. "They said Starfleet was about us carrying a big stick and that Nyota didn't belong in it." Winona wonders exactly why they thought that.

"And I, who should know better, gave him the old retort about he and whose army. Unfortunately that induced him to punch me in the face." Nyota-the-cadet clarifies.

Her son adds, "It was half-a-dozen to one." 

She has to sigh, more at the instigators than her son. "The other half of the saying is speak softly, you know. What kind of cadets is Starfleet admitting these days?"

"Ones that are more interested in defense, since the _Kelvin_ ," her son's new friend says ruefully.

Winona knows that day that Jamie is going to follow his father to the stars. But there is a lot of her in him too. It's true that even these days she might have been raised too careful as a girl to get into that fight herself, but the principle behind the thing is still exactly what she will champion.

* * *

Winona remembers the day the quadrant changes vividly, because it begins with a call from a crestfallen James, who no longer wants to go by Jamie. "It doesn't even make sense to assess people on an unwinnable test," he mutters. There are many things she could say, because he will have to learn, but for now she murmurs agreement. 

And so she's out on the farm--actually she's out pruning the plum trees, when her emergency comm flashes the warning signal that, until she looks into it, might mean there's been a tornado sighting or might mean the Deltans have orchestrated a planetwise protest of Starfleet (well, it had happened the once.)

It's not even Earth, actually, but a distress signal from Vulcan.

* * *

It's about a month later that she transports up to Washington state, barely able to believe she's been invited to _Amanda Grayson's_ house. She comes early, but she's also been invited for earlier, because Amanda's son talks about Winona's now, and his parents want to meet her individually.

Vulcans are so popularly held to indulge in no emotion that Winona never thought about exactly how they would process the loss of their home planet. She meets Ambassador Sarek who is clearly uncomfortable here, whether because of the occasion, the company, or the standard grey damp weather that is diametrically different from the desert no one can go back to, the one now wreathed in radioactive fog thanks to Nero. The both of them are undergoing treatment for radiation exposure, but they look to be in decent health.

Amanda prays that night, and that is all Winona will say about it afterwards: it is in this particular case, too private, too raw, and not her place to describe a tradition that is not her own and which she does not fully understand. She is not above letting on that Sarek seemed comforted by it, in a way she hadn't thought a Vulcan would allow himself to be.

A little later, Nyota Uhura's father arrives, and Montgomery Scott's aunt beams in, and then Leonard McCoy's ex-wife and daughter, and Christine Chapel's father and stepfathers. (It seems Lt. Chapel, the nurse's mother, is away on assignment, organizing something of the logistics necessary to resettle the Vulcans).

"It's our role to sit here and worry, isn't it?" says Jocelyn, the ex-Mrs. McCoy, at dinner.

"No," Amanda pronounces, "No, this night is--is about trying to heal and regain our hope. Even when we're not the ones out working visibly and publicly to mend up the galaxy, whatever we can do towards healing is important."

"You know that, Mom," Joanna points out "Dad's out doing what he wants to be doing, medicine on a star ship. He's not asking for us to worry."

"But dammit, I still do," and Winona thinks every heart in the room shares the feeling.

"Sorry, sorry," there are apologies as Hikaru Sulu's husband and baby show up, crowding the door with Pavel Chekov's younger siblings. There was a delay at the Tokyo transporter station, and a confusion over time zones, it turns out. 

It rains, too, that night, as is so frequently the weather here in the northwest. Joanna and both Mr. Chapels and Virginia Scott all coo appropriately over the baby and Tatiana Chekov starts a conversation with Amanda Grayson and a subdued Sarek because she has aspirations of being an ambassador and is taking language classes to that end. Vasily, the younger sibling, has lived in or near Siberia his whole life, and Mr. Uhura starts talking with him about the plants and weather in the much warmer places where he has spent much of his life. Winona chimes in a few times on the plants, and a certain warmth settles over this little collection of people. They are bound together by their shared concerns for their family members who are together, lonely out among the stars. 

They share a late dinner, a sort of potluck from favorite replicator recipes and Winona's berries in addition to their hosts' dishes. They are breaking bread together, as their loved ones do out among the stars, and Winona Kirk thinks she couldn't love humanity or their little planet or this federation they've built on peace treaties more than she does right now in this mundane little gathering of the other left-behinds, who understand how she feels about James out there, taking on the galaxy.

**Author's Note:**

> ~~am I totally satisfied with this? no~~
> 
>  
> 
> ...happy slightly belated -200-somethingth birthday, James Tiberius


End file.
